Why Newspapers Should Stop Using&nbspTinyURL

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

The inspiration for this blog post came to me when I was lying on my sofa reading the Guardian newspaper over the weekend. I was at home and so didn't have any of the following to hand:

iphone

pen

regular phone

internet

Now, you might think they're not really essential tools for reading a newspaper but you'd be wrong. While reading the paper I was struck, time and time again, by the use of TinyURL to encode long links into a newsprint format. Of course, not having any of the above tools, I had no way of either visiting the URL or noting it down for me to visit later.

Being a kind of lazy person (it was Sunday afternoon, give me a break!), rather than look up the tinyurl online or noting it down for later reference, I just shrugged my shoulders, decided I wasn't THAT interested in visiting the link anyway, and moved on to the next article. For me, this is a huge wasted opportunity for the paper and also a frustrating experience for the reader. So what's the solution? Well, before I dive into the solution, let me explain the problem a little more clearly.

Why do newspapers use TinyURL at the moment?

The overriding reason I can see for newspapers to use TinyURL at the moment is that it's short. Printing tinyurls saves valuable space which otherwise might be wasted. Printing a URL like this:

http://tinyurl.com/55mp6b

Takes up much less space than printing a URL like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0

Given the popularity of tinyurl, I've seen many many examples of them in the real world, ranging from the Guardian to the WPT magazine all the way up to the New Scientist. In short, almost everyone is using them. And they should all stop.

What's wrong with newspapers using TinyURL?

I touched on some of the reasons why they don't work that well above in my heart-rending tale of an internet marketer too lazy to move off the sofa, but here's the complete list:

You can't remember them. "Oh great, an article about quantum physics, that looks really interesting. I must remember to check out tinyurl slash x x 2 3 5 h j next time I'm at a computer." This makes them difficult to use unless you physically take your paper to your computer or you happen to have a photographic memory. (I know that these days you can now choose a custom alias for your tinyurls, but none of the newspapers use them.)

There's no branding. When you see a tinyurl you are effectively clicking blind - you have no idea what kind of site you're being taken to and there's no trace of the site you've come from.

No tracking! Tracking, tracking ,tracking. The mantra of everything you do online has been lost when you use TinyURL - you don't know how many people clicked the link, you don't know if for some reason one of your TinyURLs was copied and pasted into an email to 1000s of people. You just don't know. (I know that some services offer pretty neat tracking services, especially bit.ly, but that doesn't negate the other points listed here.)

No control over the URL shortening service. Do you trust TinyURL? How long might they be around for? What happens if they have a massive data outage tomorrow and all your URLs 404? Think that's farfetched? Check out zi.ma - this used to be a URL shortening service and now all the URLs 404. Over 67,000 links to the zi.ma domain!

What should they do instead?

Build their own URL shortening service for use exclusively by their journalists! To a technophobe like myself this seems like a lot of work, but I'm assured that it really rather simple to build a service like this - Rob knocked up Twadl, a URL shortening service in a weekend (not to belittle your achievements, Rob!).

What advantages would this have?

Well imagine that instead of using a TinyURL the Guardian used a URL like this:

links.guardian.co.uk/apr/12

or

links.guardian.co.uk/rickroll

This would then allow them to get around most of the downsides listed above: short URLs that they have control over, are able to track and are stamped with the Guardian's brand. There's one problem though that this doesn't solve...

What about the problem of remembering these short URLs?

So using either of the two formats above (one being date & numerical based and the other being alias-based), they're still not that memorable, so how do you get around this? How about creating a links page on the newspaper site which lists all the recent short-links that have been used and a brief, twitter-like description of what the link is? That way, not only do you know where to go when you forget a short link, but that page becomes like an editorial Digg or Reddit page which can demand a high volume of traffic in its own right. After all, the external links that are being dropped into the paper every day are a valuable commodity - people are always on the lookout for interesting thing to click on, and that's exactly what that page offers.

Examples from the wild

Two examples from the UK press, one doing it well and one doing it badly:

The good - The Metro use short redirect URLs quite regularly to direct traffic; for example, check out www.metro.co.uk/cats, which 301 redirects to a metro blog post.

The bad - Check out this page from the Guardian, which links to no fewer than 13 tinyurls. Regardless of your position on using TinyURLs in the print version of the paper, there's absolutely no reason to use them in the online version!

About TomCritchlow — Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for Distilled's new NYC office. Fiercely curious about life and passionate about learning new things.

Interesting conversation pointed out by one of the developers here at Distilled is the movement towards being able to specify your preferred canonical shortened version of your URL that services like Twitter should use if they can't fit the full URL - advantages include that you can use your own (and keep control) and that you can make sure it 301 redirects to the correct page.

I'm surprised that someone hasn't launched a branded URL shortening service (maybe they have and I just missed it), where companies could claim a folder or subdomain and then have all of their shortened URLs be similar. So, if I'm Apple, for example, I could have URLs like:

http://ti.ny/apple/001

...or...

http://apple.ti.ny/001

Since the numbering would only be based off of the number of URLs within that branded folder/subdomain, the encoded aspect of the URL could also be shorter.

I actually built my own, just to play around (http://userfx.us) - I like the control and trust aspect (people know those links will always go to my site), but there's a trade-off on the trust side, which is that it isn't widely recognized like a TinyURL. So, I wonder if some people don't click on it because the domain is unfamiliar.

Great post, my question would be why not use bitly service, you can setup optional custom name.

eg bit.ly/sport78

The other interesting option is to setup a listing of your all your urls, so if you just wanted to check a few, you can setup a subdomain

eg http://times.bit.ly

It also offers you a whole heap of statistics, and you can feed that same link directly to your twitter account with a short outline about the story and a note to read more about this in todays copy of the paper.

Though URL shortening seems to be the 'in thing', I developed a mistrust of tinyurl very early on, and honestly, I'm more likely NOT to go to a tinyurl link than any other. I want to see the site I'm going to end up on prior to clicking a link.

The biggest problem that I see with most short URL redirects is permanency. You have this short URL out there and 5 years from now someone has bought up TinyURL or completely changed its format and then you no longer can count on those links in any form.

This is probably the way I would implement things if I were running a Print and Online periodical:

1. Create an in-house/on-site URL shortening solution like the one richardbaxterseo points out for WordPress.

3. Create a standard procedure for tiny URL’s that uses some of the same short URL’s time and time again. If I commonly had articles about cats, dogs, Minneapolis or Seattle, then a standard short URLs would be similar to this:

a. domain.com/cats

b. domain.com/dogs

c. domain.com/minneapolis

d. domain.com/seattle

4. If there is another article that is of similar content then change the 2nd short URL to something similar, but different.

a. domain.com/cat

b. domain.com/dog

c. domain.com/twincities

d. domain.com/emeraldcity

5. Specify a time period that these short URL’s would forward to the online edition for that article depending on the expected life of the print publication. Time periods may be something like this:

a. Newspaper – 7 days to 2 weeks

b. Monthly Magazine – 1 to 2 months

c. Bi-Monthly or Quarterly publication – 2 to 4 months

6. Once the short URL has reached its minimum expected shelf life or has shown no activity in a while, redirect it to a main Category page or Search Result with similar content. Hint: include a link to the original article on that page just in case!

7. Recycle! You can be Green with your links too. Depending on how popular your article is or who may have blogged about it and posted a link to the short URL instead of the actual article URL, you may find that you can have some natural link popularity for these short URLs over time. You can reuse your short URLs for your next article on cats, dogs or whatever. You might even notice an increase in spider activity overtime due to the continuing to use these URLs time and time again.

PS - One additional point about recycling these short URLs: most Newspapers and Magazines offer timely content that may become out dated in a short amount of time. If you were to provide content that is contrary to this, then you might rethink how recycling URLs would affect your site.

As for the Xi.Ma / longevity thing - that site was unreliable and came to quite a controversial end. Most services intend to stay open for the forseeable future though how you monetize a url shortener is a pretty hard one to solve IMO.

I agree that big newspaper websites should have their own link api but if i'm not wrong tinyURL allows the user to specify the URL such as tinyURL.com/QuantumPhisycsArticle and they may include initials for some branding like tinyURL.com/NYPQuantumPhisycsArticle.

The big issues are that if for any reason tinyURL is down there will be millions of viewers that might not be able to access certain content / link.

The best solution, in my opinion, is developing an API that will allow some control and that is internal not an external source.

So no one has built a URL shortening app that will install on an Apache server? Hmmmm... seems like a valuable widget to build if someone has the time. Great post. I've always had an issue with TinyURL because of the blind link to anywhere.

I like your idea of them having their own URL shortening service, I often find an interesting link in the guardian but I never get round to visiting it because I can't remember the URL. I agree it also means the website it is linked to is missing out on promoting its brand.

I can also testify that its quite simple to build your own url shortening service if you're skilled with html/php/apache at all. I created http://sinurl.org in less than a week. It may not be as feature filled as some of the others, but its a clean user interface with an api that I can use with any of my sites to auto generate short urls. I also added in a custom naming method (hidden from the public) that does exactly what you mention.

I don't say this as an advertisement (the site was only for personal purposes really). But to emphasize that anyone considering doing this for their own print purposes, etc. that it can most definitely be done, and done fairly cheaply. Now there's no need to reinvent the wheel. But for a newspaper, branding, etc. this would be a great idea.

You would think the news and journalism space would understand that keeping information "in the family" with useful linking techniques would be crystal clear, but you'd be wrong.

Clearly the mini URLs are short, but there is something to be said about being descript without overdoing it and also to consider the future of technologies online and how information is and will be passed in years to come.

The bad - Check out this page from the Guardian, which links to no fewer than 13 tinyurls. Regardless of your position on using TinyURLs in the print version of the paper, there's absolutely no reason to use them in the online version!

Also, why are they writing out each link, instead of making the link the actual words. Pain the butt to read. All I see is tinyurl.com instead of the actual article.

That's interesting indeed. Shorthanding the url -regardless the service- is good for microblogging not newspapers yet in case there is a must to shorten them, the idea suggested in the article is more relevant as every newespaper will have its own flavoured tinyurl!

One thing that was missed as another negative for this practise is the actual business sites the links are going to missing out on a valuable opportunity to push their brand... or maybe that's seen as a positive by the papers!

(Sorry if someone else has already commented about this, I haven't read through all of the comments.)

My biggest problem with using Tiny URL is that it is blocked by SonicWall so I can't see any site via those links. Using a custom URL trick like linktank found at SharkSEO (no relation) is great because if your site is safe (i.e. not blocked), so is your short URL.

2. Someone at the Guardian looking at eye tracking studies and seeing that there's less clickthrough on long URLs.

3. A misguided attempt to control the domains they link out to, but this makes the least sense, since they could just nofollow all the links if they were really concerned about linking out.

What I really don't get is why they'e adding the tinyurls instead of just using anchor text like they do on "Ziggy Remixed," and why they opt to do it just that once (the other anchor text link points to another page w/i The Guardian's site).

Interesting post and quite a tricky topic with, IMO, no esy solution. We used to have a simialr problem when I worked for a publisher, simply trying to add URLs for the articles themselves, let alone the sites they're then linking to.

I'd suggest that the simplest way to solve this would be to create shortened URLs for every article (Guardian.co.uk/12345 or something - I don't know, I'm not a dev!) and then from the web version of the article, you just link normally.

A good post considering the wider context of newspapers struggling to adapt to life in the digital age. I like the idea of using shortened URLs to generate more content for the site - a genius move surely for any paper.

using tinyurl in a newspaper is so unprofessional, i wouldn't belive it, if i hadn't seen it. a custom redirection service involves one simple 5 lines mod_rewrite .htaccess file, a single php file with max. 10 lines and one database table with 2 columns. a web developer can set this up in half an hour.